Day 301 - Beach Story

Beach Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Hamilton came to the beach and waited. He watched the waves and felt the sand between his toes and tried not to think about it. He couldn’t help but think about it. It was impossible not to think about it. He could feel the death all around him. That’s all there was here. It overpowered everything else. Certainly other things had occurred here from time to time, but the death was overwhelming. It was all he could feel.

Behind him in the woods there was darkness. He did not want to turn around. He did not want to look at it. It was perhaps darker than the beach itself. He didn’t want to know. The beach was enough. It was almost too much. He didn’t think he could handle any more than that at the moment.

The voices were everywhere. The shouts. The pain. They all called to him. He could feel every single one of them. So much pain. So much suffering. It was all so needless.

Hamilton had been hearing them for days. He had been feeling them for days. He was drawn to the beach. It was like a beacon, reaching out to him. He didn’t want to go, but he needed to find a way to make things stop. It was driving him mad. It was too much to handle. He needed it to stop.

It was a lovely beach. The waves came in calmly and gently. There didn’t seem to be too many rocks or anything dangerous like coral reefs. There was no indication as to what killed them all. It was just an ordinary beach.

Except that it wasn’t an ordinary beach. It was a beach of blood and death. There were souls that had been ripped apart and scattered to the winds. There were spirits trapped in agony. It was a powerful force that emanated and rippled forth from this spot. It spread in all directions across time and space. The spiritual energy created from that one moment of tragedy created a spectral life energy that could not be undone. It was too powerful.

Hamilton had spoken with the dead before. He had helped a few ghosts and dispatched an unruly poltergeist. He had never wanted this ability, but it was one that he had and he couldn’t ignore it. At first he believed that they had called him here, that they were looking for a way to move on, and that they thought he would be able to help them. But there were too many of them, their power was too great, and there was nothing that he could do.

Hamilton sat on the beach and listened to the waves crash against the shore. It did nothing to muffle the screams of sorrow, but it gave him something else to try to focus on. They were like the tide. They came in waves. They were like ripples in a pond. Their energy had to spread and hopefully slowly dissipate. Over and over the screams came. Slowly. Over and over. He sat and waited as they slowly played themselves out and moved on. The ripples spread over time. He had no idea what was important about this beach or why there was so much blood and death here. Perhaps there was a great battle that had happened here in the past, or perhaps there was one yet to come. Many people had died. They had been slaughtered. Their misery to be felt for years to come. Hamilton sat on the beach and let them wash over him and felt what they needed him to feel, and slowly, ever so slowly, they began to wash away.